Perspective on the 21st century : Practical lessons from my management experience

The dramatic changes in the industrial structure since World War II owe much to technological advances that have enabled corporations to pursue their endeavors on unprecedented scale, as in mass production and mass retailing. 1 characterized my management emphasis as ‘C&C’ which stands for the integration of computers and communications. C&C is a technological frontier that has spawned a continuing stream of new products and advanced concepts. C&C, however, is a very different kind of technological advance. As C&C takes hold in society and as information networks mature, information will become the central element in new amalgams with the other traditional corporate resources: people, money, and property.     

Top management team social capital,exploration-based innovation,and exploitation-based innovation in SMEs

Despite increasing interest in ambidextrous innovations, mainstream literature has excluded discussions on developing and combining exploratory innovation (ERI) and exploitative innovation (EII) in the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector. This issue from the SME perspective is worth addressing. Recent studies have conceptually argued the importance of the top management team (TMT) in managing ambidextrous innovations. Building on this argument, we explore how the top manager external social relationships foster ambidextrous innovations and whether internal social relationships among senior executives can be used to integrate such innovations. The results show that (a) distinct external managerial relationships cause differential innovations for SMEs, and (b) internal social capital among top managers could be used effectively to manage ambidextrous innovations. This research indicates that SMEs engaging in both high ERI and EII perform better when they focus on the balancing benefits of TMT internal social capital and the bridging benefits of TMT external social capital.     

Full versus quasi MLE for ARMA-GARCH models with infinitely divisible innovations

We compare the backtesting performance of ARMA-GARCH models with the most common types of infinitely divisible innovations, fit with both full maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and quasi maximum likelihood estimation (QMLE). The innovation types considered are the Gaussian, Student’s t, α-stable, classical tempered stable (CTS), normal tempered stable (NTS) and generalized hyperbolic (GH) distributions. In calm periods of decreasing volatility, MLE and QMLE produce near identical performance in forecasting value-at-risk (VaR) and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). In more volatile periods, QMLE can actually produce superior performance for CTS, NTS and α-stable innovations. While the t-ARMA-GARCH model has the fewest number of VaR violations, rejections by the Kupeic and Berkowitz tests suggest excessively large forecasted losses. The α-stable, CTS and NTS innovations compare favourably, with the latter two also allowing for option pricing under a single market model.     

异质性媒体与资本市场信息效率

新闻传媒通过其信息处理和传播功能 ,对资本市场的信息整合产生了重要影响.不同于以往的研究 ,文章深入新闻传媒行业内部 ,探讨了不同类别的媒体(中央媒体与各地方媒体)对中国资本市场信息效率的差异化影响.研究发现:中央媒体既可以直接提升资本市场信息效率 ,又可以通过削弱政治关联对资本市场信息整合的不利影响,间接改善资本市场信息效率;地方媒体虽然能够直接提升资本市场信息效率 ,但是无力削弱政治关联对资本市场信息整合的不利影响 ,其间接渠道并不起作用.这一结果考虑了媒体跟踪上市公司时可能产生的内生性问题 ,在一系列稳健性测试中始终存在.文章认为 ,相对于地方媒体 ,中央媒体在信息透明度较低情况下的信息获取和处理的能力优势 ,以及面对政治关联时保持客观报道的独立性优势,可以解释这一发现.     

A Pathway Forwards for the Social Capital Metaphor

A major topic in economics is the analysis of a broad class of phenomena associated with interpersonal relationships, a topic that originally grew from theories of “social capital.” While the concept has been instrumental in bringing increased attention to social effects on economic outcomes, it has increasingly been replaced with approaches that consider instead networks and discrete interactions rather than aggregate measures of social capital. This has been an analytical improvement, but a great deal of work remains to bring empirical validity and relevancy to social network analysis. This paper presents two important approaches for achieving this, statistical analysis and agent-based modeling, and discusses their benefits, limitations, and complementary nature. Rather than waiting for either approach to achieve an ambiguous quality of maturity, integrating statistical analysis with simulation models of networks must begin now to push the frontiers of social network analysis forward.     

Strategic niche management: towards a policy tool for sustainable development

Strategic niche management (SNM) is a recently developed approach that could help induce a broad socio-technical transition towards more sustainable development. It is designed to facilitate the introduction and diffusion of new sustainable technologies through protected societal experiments in fields such wind energy, biogas, public transport systems, electric vehicle transport and eco-friendly food production. A major challenge in SNM concerns the processes by which such experiments can evolve into viable market niches and ultimately contribute to a broader shift towards sustainable development. This paper sheds more light on this issue by systematically consolidating the main SNM studies, and by bringing in new insights from the literature that is in some sense complementary to SNM. These are studies on the development and commercialisation of radical innovations in large companies, and literature about infant industry protection and broader industrialisation processes in developing countries. A number of suggestions for implementing SNM are given.     

Beyond classical van Westendorp: Assessing price sensitivity for variants of algae-based meat substitutes

Food product innovations are characterized by high flop rates. In an early development stage, manifold product formulations seem feasible. To determine the most promising product option, market research can help, but is frequently considered too costly and complex. We assess the applicability of the van Westendorp approach, an inexpensive and simple method, for guiding early product design and pricing decisions for novel foods. Findings from a between-subject experiment for meat substitutes consisting of different shares of micro-algae indicate that micro-algae, while a cost driver, has little effect on price preferences. Implications for novel food product design, market research, and retailing are discussed.     

环境分权对低碳发展的异质性影响——基于省级面板数据的实证研究

优化配置生态环境治理权责是实现绿色低碳发展的基础支撑。立足于我国省级面板数据,采用局部性分析视角揭示环境分权对低碳发展的异质性影响。基于莫兰特征向量的空间滤波随机效应模型表明,尽管两者之间非空间异质性不显著,但存在显著的空间异质性,呈现出“东北-西南”方向性差异,即东北方向倾向于加剧效应,而西南方向则表现为抑制效应。该发现回应了全局性分析中存在的“效应抵消”问题,同时也为当前环境治理体制改革提供了更具地域性的思路,有助于避免政策的“一刀切”问题。     

Setting an exam as an information design problem

We take a teacher's exam-setting task as an information design problem. Specifically, the teacher chooses a conditional distribution of grades given students' types. After observing their exam results, each student updates her belief regarding her type via Bayes' rule and chooses an action. Students' reactions to the same exam result could be different, depending on their heterogeneous prior beliefs. The teacher's objective is to persuade students to take a certain action (e.g., applying to universities), which some may not choose without an exam. The teacher adopts different grade distributions, depending on the teacher's and the students' heterogeneous prior beliefs.     

Predicting stock realized variance based on an asymmetric robust regression approach

This paper introduces an asymmetric robust weighted least squares (ARLS) approach to improve the forecasting performance of the heterogeneous autoregressive model for realized volatility. The ARLS approach down-weights extreme observations to limit the bad influence of outliers on the estimated parameters. Compared with existing robust regression methods, our model further takes into account the asymmetry of outliers using a class of kernel functions. Out-of-sample results show the ARLS approach can generate more accurate forecasts of the S&P 500 index realized volatility in the statistical and economic senses. The model that considers the asymmetry of outliers gains superior performance among various robust regression competitors. The forecasting improvements also hold in other international stock markets. More importantly, the source of the predictive ability of the ARLS model comes from the less biased and more efficient parameter estimation.